My library has used Omeka as part of our suite of platforms for creating digital collections and exhibits for many years now. It’s easy to administer and use, and many of our students, particularly in history or digital humanities, learn how to create exhibits with it in class or have experience with it from other institutions, which makes it a good solution for student projects. This creates challenges, however, since it’s been difficult to have multiple sites or distributed administration. A common scenario is that we have a volunteer student, often in history, working on a digital exhibit as part of a practicum, and we want the donor to review the exhibit before it goes live. We had to create administrative accounts for both the student and the donor, which required a lot of explanations about how to get in to just the one part of the system they were supposed to be in (it’s possible to create a special account to view collections that aren’t public, but not exhibits). Even though the admin accounts can’t do everything (there’s a super admin level for that), it’s a bit alarming to hand out administrative accounts to people I barely know.

This problem goes away with Omeka S, which is the new and completely rebuilt Omeka. It supports having multiple sites (which is the new name for exhibits) and distributed administration by site. Along with this, there are sophisticated metadata templates that you can assign to sites or users, which takes away the need for lots of documentation on what metadata to use for which item type. When I showed a member of my library’s technical services department the metadata templates in Omeka S, she gasped with excitement. This should indicate that, at least for those of us working on the back end, this is a fun system to use.

Trying it Out For Yourself

I have included some screenshots below, but you might want to use the Omeka S Sandbox to follow along. You can experiment with anything, and the data is reset every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. This includes a variety of sample exhibits, one is “A Battered Tin Dispatch Box” from which I include some screenshots below.

A Quick Tour Through Omeka S

This is what the Omeka Classic administrative dashboard looks like for a super administrator.And this is the dashboard for Omeka S. It’s not all that different functionally, but definitely a different aesthetic experience.

Most things in Omeka S work analogously to classic Omeka, but some things have been renamed or moved around. The documentation walks through everything in order, so it’s a great place to start learning. Overall, my feeling about Omeka S is that it’s much easier to tap into the powerful features with less of a learning curve. I first learned Omeka S at the DLF Forum conference in fall 2017 directly from Patrick Murray-John, the Omeka Development Team Manager, and some of what is below is from his description.

Sites

Omeka S has the very useful concept of Sites, which again function like exhibits in classic Omeka. Each site has its own set of administrative functions and user permissions, which allow for viewer, editor, or admin by site. I really appreciate this, since it allowed me to give student volunteers access to just the site they needed, and when we need to give other people access to view the site before it’s published we can do that. It’s easier to add outside or supplementary materials to the exhibit navigation. On the individual pages there are a variety of blocks available, and the layout is easier for people without a lot of HTML skills to set up.

Resource Templates

These existed in Omeka Classic, but were less straightforward. Now you can set a resource template with properties from multiple vocabularies and build the documentation right into the template. The data type can be text or URI, or draw from vocabularies with autosuggest. For example, you can set the Rights field to draw from Rights Statement options.

Items

Items work in a similar fashion to Omeka Classic. Items exist at the installation level, so can be reused across multiple sites. What’s great is that the nature of an item can be much more flexible. They can include URIs, maps, and multiple types of media such as a URL, HTML, IIIF image, oEmbed, or YouTube. This reflects the actual way that we were using Omeka Classic, but without the technical overhead to make it all work. This will make it easier for more people to create much more interactive and web-integrated exhibits.

Item Sets

Item Sets are the new name given to Collections and, like Items, they can have metadata from multiple vocabularies. Item Sets are analogous to Collections, but items can be in multiple Item Sets to be associated with sites to limit what people see. The tools for batch adding and editing are similar, but more powerful because you can actually remove or edit metadata in bulk.

Themes

Themes in Omeka S have changed quite a bit, and as Murray-John explained, it is more complicated to do theming than in the past. Rather than call to local functions, Omeka S uses patterns from Zend Framework 3, and so the process of theming will require more careful thought and planning. That said, the base themes provided are a great base, and thanks to the multiple options for layouts in sites, it’s less critical to be able to create custom themes for certain exhibits. I wrote about how to create themes in Omeka in 2013, and while some of that still holds true, you would want to consult the updated documentation to see how to do this in Omeka S.

Mapping

One of my favorite things in Omeka S is the Mapping module, which allows you to add geolocation metadata to items, and create a map on site pages. Here’s an example from the Omeka S Sandbox with locations related to Scotland Yard mapped for an item in the Battered Tin Dispatch Box exhibit.

This can then turn into an interactive map on the front end.

For the vast majority of mapping projects that our students want to do, this works in a very straightforward manner. Neatline is a plugin for Omeka Classic that allows much more sophisticated mapping and timelines–while it should be ported over to Omeka S, it currently is not listed as a module. In my experience, however, Neatline is more powerful than what many people are trying to do, and that added complexity can be a challenge. So I think the Mapping module looks like a great compromise.

Possible Approaches to Migration

Migration between Omeka Classic and Omeka S works well for items. For that, there’s the Omeka2 Importer module. Because exhibits work differently, they would have to be recreated. Omeka.net, the hosted version of Omeka, will stay on Omeka Classic for the foreseeable future, so there’s no concern that it will stop being supported any time soon, according to Patrick Murray-John.

Conclusion

We are still working on setting up Omeka S. My personal approach is that as new ideas for exhibits come up we will start them first in Omeka S. As we have time and interest, we may start to migrate older exhibits if they need continual management. Because some of our older exhibits rely on Omeka Classic pla but are planning to mostly create new exhibits in there that don’t rely on Omeka Classic plugins. I am excited to pair this with our other digital collection platforms to build exhibits that use content across our platforms and extend into the wider web.

Omeka is an easy to use content management system for digital exhibits created by the Ray Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. It’s very modular, so you can customize it for various functions. I won’t go into the details here on how to set up Omeka, but you can read documentation and see example collections at Omeka.org. If you want to experiment with Omeka without installing it on your own server, you can set up a hosted account at Omeka.net

Earlier this year Omeka was completely rewritten and released a 2.0 version (now 2.1). Like with many open source content management systems, it took awhile for the contributed plug-ins and themes to catch up to the new release. As of July, most of the crucial contributed plug-ins were available, and if you haven’t yet updated your installation this is a good time to think about doing so. In this post I’m going to focus on the process of customizing Omeka 2.0 to your institution, and specifically creating a custom theme. While there are now several good themes available for 2.0, you will probably want to make a default theme that matches the rest of your website. One of the nice features of Omeka that is quite different from other content management systems is that it is very easy for the people who create exhibits to pick a custom theme that differs from the default theme. That said, providing a custom theme for your institution makes it easy for visitors to know where they are, and will also make it easier on the staff who are creating exhibits since you can adapt the theme to their needs.

Planning

Like any design project, you should start with a discussion with the people who use the system most. (If you are new to design, check the ACRL TechConnect posts on design). In my case, there are two archives on campus who both use Omeka for their exhibits. Mock up what the layout should look like–you may not be able to get it perfectly, but use this as a guide to future development. We came up with a rough sketch based on what the archivist liked and didn’t like about templates available, and worked together on determining the priorities for the design. (Side note: if you can get your whole wall painted with whiteboard paint this is a very fun collaborative project.)

Rough sketch of ideas for new theme.

Development

Development is very easy to start when you are modifying an existing theme. Start with a theme (there are only a few that are 2.0 compatible) that is close to what you need. Rather than the subtheme system you may be used to with Drupal or WordPress, with Omeka you can pick the theme you want to hack on and copy the entire directory and rename it.

Here was the process I followed to build my theme. I suggest that you set up a local development environment (I used XAMPP) to do this work, but make sure that you have at least one exhibit to test, since some of the CSS is different for exhibits than for the rest of the site.

Pick a theme

Seasons (with the Autumn color scheme)

I started with the Seasons theme. I copied the seasons directory from the themes directory and pasted it back with a new name of luctest (which I renamed when it was time to move it to a production environment).

Modify theme.ini

This is what you will start with. You really only need to edit the author, title, and description unless you want to edit the rest.

Check which elements are set in the configuration (i.e. the person such as an archivist who is creating the exhibit can set them) and which you need to set in the theme. This can cause a lot of frustration when you attempt to style an element whose value is actually set by the user. If you don’t want to allow the user to change anything, you can take that option out of the config.ini, just make sure you’ve set it elsewhere.

Open up css/style.css and check which elements you need to modify (note that some themes may have the style sheets divided up differently.) Some items are obvious, some you will have to use Firebug or another tool to determine which class styles the element. You can always ask in the Omeka themes and display forum if you can’t figure it out.

The Seasons theme has different styles for each color scheme, and in the interests of time I picked the color scheme closest to the color scheme I wanted to end with. You could use the concept of different schemes to identify the collections and/or exhibits of different units. Make sure you read through the whole style sheet first to determine which elements are theme-wide, and which are set in the color scheme.

Test, test, test

The 2.0 themes that I’ve experimented with are all responsive and work well with different browsers. This probably goes without saying, but if you have changed the spacing at all, make sure you test your design in multiple window sizes and devices.

Voila

Final version of redesigned theme.

We have a few additional items to add to this design, but it’s met our immediate needs very well, and most importantly matches the design of the Archives and Special Collections website so it’s clear to users that they are still in the right place.

Next steps

Since this was a new content management system to me, I still have a lot to learn about the best ways to do certain things. This experience was helpful not just in learning Omeka, but also as a small-scale test of planning a new theme for our entire library website, which runs on Drupal.